Lab Talk: Data-driven design of healthcare services

Maria Karampela is a PhD student at the IT University of Copenhagen and will share her research with us.

A paradigm shift in the provision of healthcare services is taking place, which can be credited to various factors such as a demographic change of the global population. Global demographics change is posed by an increase of the ageing population (WHO, 2015). In addition to that, an increase in life expectancy (OECD, 2019) and improvements in acute care treatment and diagnosis of diseases have contributed towards chronification of diseases that previously considered life terminal (Bedard, 2019; Jacobson, 2018).

Traditional healthcare services are often designed to manage health conditions in disconnected and fragmented ways so that in many cases they are not responding to users’ information needs. To support this change, future healthcare services need to respond to users’ information needs in connected ways. The emergence of connected health services paradigm and the potential of utilization of Big data in preventive and personalized care has been envisioned to enable personalized care, without jeopardizing the quality of services, while reducing expenditures (Koster, 2016). To achieve that, the role of data is essential (Raghupathi & Raghupathi, 2014).

Taking into consideration the above, my research seeks to answer the following question: How to model the use of healthcare services based on data-driven perceptions of users?